Re: Comments and pingbacks

This is primarily a note in response to ~ew, who brought to my attention an article by iveqy.

I’m not going to respond to ~ew’s complaints except to say that the web began in 1991, and Wikipedia didn't start until 2001. Gemini began in 2019; it’s still early days here. At a corresponding point in the development of the web, I was publishing a university newspaper by writing Emacs functions that converted the RTF files used by the editors in PageMaker to HTML and manually linking them to a weekly index page. I don’t want or expect Gemini to recapitulate the ontogeny of the WWW, but even if our goals were aligned, we'd have a lot of growth to go before we were ready for WikiPedia.

What I actually want to write about is the lack of comments. Now, I agree with ~mernisse that comments on blogs are actually a bad thing. That said, I have thought in the past that it would be good to have a means of linking cross-blog discussions that is better than hoping the person you're replying to notices your follow-up on CAPCOM. I have in the past talked about implementing a simplified version of Webmention for Gemini, but never got around to it, in part because at the time I was thinking about it, Germinal didn't support any kind of dynamic content. Now that it does, I may go back and reconsider it.